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A New Republic of the Heart:
An Ethos for Revolutionaries –
A Guide to Inner Work for Holistic Change

Author: Terry Patten
North Atlantic Books
2018
ISBN: 1623170478

“A New Republic of the Heart” is a 408 page book on the transformation of civilization in regard to our current global issues. To get the most out of this book, one needs to look at the background of the author. Terry Patten has devoted his life to understanding the evolution of consciousness by facing, examining, and healing our global crisis through merging spirit and activism. He is a philosopher, activist, and social entrepreneur. His written works encourage his readers to become activists in their own way, in their own lives.

In his introduction, Patten talks about our need for guidance from a higher wisdom. He makes the very interesting observation that all of humanities highest wisdom traditions are in conversation as never before. He also asks: How can we “be the change that we want to see in the world”?

Patten talks about “whole system change”, a broad transformation of all human civilization. Constant transformation. Like it or not, we are all interconnected. Patten teaches us to turn what we see as problems into opportunities, to encourage conversation with those we agree with, as well as those that we do not agree with, and to form creative responses. He encourages all of us to be active agents of transformation. It can be scary, as we face both spiritual and political awakenings – and see how intertwined they are.

Patten has broken this material into four parts: Part One puts the material into a multidimensional consciousness. Part Two explores the integral understanding of the nature of individual and collective spiritual practice, purpose, social responsibility, and evolutionary activism.

The work that we do here is both inner and outer work. The writing in this book is clear and concise. While Patten talks about global issues, about issues that we face on a day to day basis, he speaks at a level that we can all understand, about subjects that have great depth. I liked the manner in which this material was organized – it describes the journey that Patten has taken, and allows us to take the journey with him. The problems that we are facing are termed “wicked problems”, because they are wickedly hard to solve. Patten notes that some people have categorized climate change as a “super-wicked problem”. Then there are the “black swan events” – transformation that comes about dramatically and suddenly, due to events that we could not have predicted.

I have to note here something that I was fascinated by, and that was the Four Quadrant diagram, where we are looking at interior and exterior, merged with individual and collective. The four resulting quadrants are Subjective, Objective, Intersubjective, and Interobjective. Quite the picture in words!

I highly recommend this book to anyone that wants to transform themselves and the world around them. At the end of the book Patten presents a list of resources to help the reader implement this material into their own lives. I found this list to be comprehensive, and useable. There are some marvelous tools for change here! Another plus is that there is an index of names and terms, with a link to where they can be found in the book.